Theatre Reviews

StoryTellers Theater Arts Academy is now rehearsing an adaptation of the Tony Award-winning musical Les Miserables, which will mark the company’s Bowie Playhouse debut May 2 to 5. Founded in 2016 by mother-daughter team Terry Sweet Bouma, artistic director, and Alyssa Bouma, production director, StoryTellers has mounted seven productions in venues across the area, from Into the Woods and A Midsummer Night’s Dream to A Tribute to Patsy Cline and Twelfth Night.

William Finn is best known for writing and composing The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee Falsettos with his collaborator, writer and director James Lapine. Soon after Falsettos opened in 1992, Finn was rushed to the hospital with what turned out to be arteriovenous malformation: an abnormal formation of blood vessels in the brain. He survived, with A New Brain the result of Lapine’s insistence that Finn keep a record of his own recovery.

School of Rock is a success by all measures.
The 2003 movie starred Jack Black, who won an MTV Movie Award for Best Comedic Performance and was nominated for a Golden Globe Best Actor. In 2015, Downton Abbey creator Julian Fellowes rewrote the movie for stage with new music by Andrew Lloyd Webber. It was nominated for four Tonys.
Magic happened when Southern High School Drama Company brought the musical spectacular to Harwood.

Under the direction of Jeff Larson, this Twin Beach Players theater treat, Certain Souls, written by New York Times editor Ken Jaworoski, is as warm, as buttery smooth and as salty as a bag of crisp, freshly popped popcorn can be. You might even lick your fingers from the back row.

Victor Hugo penned Notre-Dame de Paris in 1831 and created some of literature’s most enduring characters: the courageous Gypsy girl Esmerelda, the dashing Captain Pheobus, the dour Archdeacon Frollo and the partially deaf, physically deformed bell-ringer Quasimodo. Hugo’s captivating story continues to thrill audiences in film and stage productions, most notably for moderns the 1996 Disney animated film with its award-winning soundtrack and happy ending.

Disney’s The Little Mermaid features a unique element when it opens this weekend at Annapolis High School: American Sign Language.
A complete, complex language all its own, American Sign Language uses signs — made by moving the hands — along with facial expressions and body posture.

In these times of acrimony, hypocrisy and hate, is it an impossible dream to believe in chivalry, goodness and love? Not according to Don Quixote, the would-be knight errant whose comic yet sincere optimism and swashbuckling bravery send pessimism packing every time. There’s a lesson there for us all.

The plays of William Shakespeare are often placed into more modern settings, and there couldn’t be a better match than The Merry Wives of Windsor and the 1980s. Shakespeare’s comedy stars Sir John Falstaff, who embodies the excess, greed and bombast of a decade that spawned Reaganomics, conservatism and MTV.

With music by former ABBA band-mates Benny Anderson and Bjorn Ulvaeus and lyrics by Tim Rice of Jesus Christ Superstar and Evita fame, Chess made a hit with its 1984 concept album. Not only was the music exciting and unique, the story of two chess grandmasters playing for their countries was perfectly timed as an allegory to the then-current Cold War tensions between Russia and the U.S.